Pexels Photoshop Plugin Review: Free stock images!

Review Update, May 28, 2021: The Pexels Photoshop Plugin is not available at this time. According to Pexels staff they plan on developing a new version in the coming months.

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Free stock image sites are getting better and better and have some amazing offerings on their websites. With the Pexels plugin you can now search for stock images right inside your Photoshop interface! Forget having to to interrupt your workflow by going to their website!

Just like the plugins included with Photoshop, Pexels is totally free and works great right out of the box. The installation does require a couple of extra steps, but it’s well worth the effort.

Pexels plugin full review

Once you have the Pexels plugin installed, you’ll find it under your available extensions. Go to Windows > Extensions > Pexels. This opens the Pexels search box, and you can decide if you want to dock it with your interface for easy access next time you open Photoshop. This is very convenient!

The Pexels Photoshop plugin is really easy to use. Simply open up the interface and search for your keyword. The results will show as thumbnails that you can scroll through to find and download the perfect free stock image for your project.

Each thumbnail has three options. You can select “Click to insert” to download the image and load it into your document. The other options in the Pexels plugin interface are to open the image on pexels.com, or to “like” the image which will place it under your favorites so you can insert it at any future time.

When you select an image to download, it is placed as a smart objects on a new layer right above your active layer. Downloads are automatically resized to fit your canvas size according to either height or width.

Unfortunately the Pexels Plugin doesn’t allow you to just download an image as a new file. However, you can always go into the smart object and save that as a jpg if you want.

Pexels Plugin Settings

There are not a lot of settings for the Pexels plugin, but let’s have a look at what is available. You can select two image size options for your downloads; either original size (maximum resolution available), or a reduced size of (max width of 890px and max height of 650px).

By default the Pexels plugin places your downloaded images above your active layer as a clipped layer. You can toggle this option off if you don’t want your downloads clipped.

Conclusion

Pexels is a fantastic stock image Photoshop plugin for anyone who uses free stock photos on a regular basis. It is especially useful when you are looking for very specific images that can be found with simple keyword searches.

One downside is that you aren’t able to just download plain jpgs onto your computer. Another downside is that you’ll miss out on the similar images that are displayed along with your searches on their website. Both of these are minor and considering that it’s free, it is really not a big deal.

The Pexels plugin is also featured on our list of five amazing plugins for creative artists!